Hopefully you'll pardon my angry words, as I am flabbergasted that even after 16 pages of this thread, Trevor et al. still have no idea what you are doing, what you are destroying, and what will be lost because you will not listen. It takes quite a lot to make me angry, but I have reached that point.
trevor said:
You keep asking about what my intent is. I thought I communicated this with you in my previous posts but I guess it was not clear enough:
No, because you haven't said what exactly you're going to do in response to what we've said. I'm not even sure you're reading these responses, although your eyes might be catching bits of them on screen and getting tidbits of data, it's certainly not all getting thru to you.
- Upgrade the software running the site to vBulletin
Doing that, regardless of what else is done to the site, is basically going to lose me here, unless before you change it over you can make it look and work just like the PHPBB forum does right now for me, without me having to waste hours of my life redoing all the stuff I already did to make it work for me.
You may lose others that don't like Vbulletin but haven't spoken up yet or dont' know about any of this. Probably not for the same reasons as me, but I do know I'm not the only person with similar problems on the site.
- Develop a vendor program so we serve nice looking and relevant ads to our viewers (logged in members can turned off the ads at anytime)
You're definitely not reading what we're saying.
Go back and try again.
Doing that is going to lose you lots of contributors and contributions to the knowledge on the site.
If you keep the ads to just a totally separate marketplace page, not part of the forum itself, I have a feeling most could live with that.
Stick them in the forum and use our contributions as bait for vendors and customers, and you lose us and our stuff.
We've given freely of our time and knowledge, and traded that back and forth to build this place. Respect that, listen to us, don't do what you appear to be planning.
- Find ways to give back to the EV community and take care of the members who have contributed to making ES such a great place.
Try LISTENING to us, right now, before you do ANYTHING to the site. If you don't do that, ES won't be a place AT ALL, great or not.
It's Friday night and after all the stress from taking this thread personally I am going to sign off for the night and have a beer.
You might want to have a good think about it, instead, and realize that while you might own the name, you don't own any of the contributors, and whatever you might think you don't own the contributions themselves, either.
If you don't think we have a say in what happens to those and how they are used, you are mistaken. I really hope you realize that really soon, because I would love to see this work out for everyone rather than cause the destruction of what has been the best ebike/ev forum on the planet for some time, as well as my favorite home away from home.
If you want to talk about stress, how about we talk about the stress that you are putting the entire membership thru right now (and what I'm going thru as I watch this place essentially dissolve in flames around me...if you had any idea what autism and asperger's are, you might have some tiny inkling about it...but all day I've been torn between feeling like puking my guts out and crying).
Joseph C. said:
Amberwolf has expressed serious concerns about the members deleting all of their threads. As he has Asperger's Syndrome such changes would cause him a lot of torment.
The forum changes themselves would do that quite well without any deletions, but I really hope it doens't come to deletions. (although those would bother me a bit less knowing how justified they appear to be at this point).
Andy said:
I understand your point about the Open Source nature and feeling sold out. I don't know about the details of when ES was started or why expectations were set that way.
I am pretty sure that you have no clue how we feel about this, and I am also pretty sure that neither you nor Trevor cares. It's hard to tell since you both talk like the managers I didn't like that have taken over at places I've worked.
Ad blockers are also an option for a guest who does not like to see ads.
It has nothing to do with blocking or turnign off ads. It has to do with having them there in the first place, and what that does and implies. Try reading what has already been written, cuz I'm already awful tired of re-explaining it, and I bet others are, too.
